self-portrait

sometimes i rearrange mental furniture at 3 in the

morning; tearing books off of shelves placing chairs in

strange positions, and forget to write letters to

distant relatives and wish happy birthdays to friends, but

that doesn’t stop me from dancing in front of mirrors as if

they were placed in studio halls and fighting as if bruises didn’t last for

several days and

running doesn’t cause my surgery laden knees to ache but

sometimes i think i’ll reach somewhere

beyond where the trees break and

where the sky and the ground meet, where

the blue river mixes with the pink finger-painted sky if

i don’t stop, so

i don’t.

-

sometimes i have thoughtless nights staring at the

white dots that form my ceiling and

sometimes i have too many thoughts at night that

i can see whirling around my head until

they tire me into the submission of sleep, but

that doesn’t mean i don’t dream about

the things i can’t see but want anyway, things like

love and being remembered for being more than

a compilation of cells, more than skin and bones that

ache at the end of the night.

-

sometimes i play dated music at obscure hours, shelved in

battered packages and faded cardboard collections, echoes of

people who no longer remain in bodies but lie

between the scratches of the records passed down from

my mother and father, more pieces of the people they used to be, given to

me as a last effort to remember their own

ill-fated rebellious adolescence.

sometimes i fall in love with a feeling and

fall out of love with reason but

that doesn’t mean that i’m wrong.

sometimes i find myself in the words that

i write and sometimes that’s

all i need

to be.